ABSTRACT
Part II is made up of contributions which consider the organisation of linkages at the boundaries of multinational enterprises. The first chapter by Burton brings together insights from Porter’s (1980) notion of competitive advantage and Kanter’s (1994) notion of collaborative advantage to form the hybrid concept of ‘composite’ strategy. The pursuit of either extreme is unlikely to be optimal. The critical choice is the appropriate combination of competitive and collaborative strategies that are appropriate to the firm’s internal and external environments. This formulation is particularly important in the context of international business, where flexibility is an essential element of success. Collaboration with a rival in one market may well be accompanied by fierce competition in another. The multinational firm’s optimal strategy fits all these competitive and collaborative sub-strategies together into the overall picture of corporate composite strategy.
